Importance Of Social Network Analysis

3.3.2 Network Analysis

Social network analysis focuses on ties among, for example, people, groups of people, organisations, and countries. These ties combine to form networks, as social network analysts assume that interpersonal ties matter, as do ties among organisations or countries, because they transmit behaviour, attitudes, information, or goods. Social network analysis offers methodology to analyse social relations, it tells how to conceptualise social networks and how to analyse the, where the main gaol of social network analysis is detecting and interpreting patterns of social ties among actors (Nooy et al., 2005). Many contributions on entrepreneurship examine various types of relationships or network structure that are labelled as “social capital” (Gedajlovic et al., 2013). Mention is made of investment in social relations with expected returns (Lin, 1999). Therefore, the main assumption in social capital theory is that individuals engage in interactions and networking in order to enhance outcomes concerning access to resources at multiple levels of analysis and cross a diverse set of situations and contexts (Moss et al., 2011). Resources such as knowledge, information, and trust derive from relationships among individuals or collectives, as well as the frequency of the interaction, relationship, or

He argued that social capital is a function of individual’s opportunities in a network, which means that certain network forms deemed social capital can enhance the entrepreneur’s ability to identify and develop opportunities (Burt, 2005). Therefore, entrepreneur with more social capital get higher returns, because the network affects the resources flow and what network’s actors can do with it (Yiu & Lau, 2008, Pollack et al., 2015, Tan et al.,